Expanding the Practice of Ecosystem Health

Excerpt

Ecosystem Health was borne of curiosity, but not idle curiosity. It was a spirited conversation in 1977 between an environmental statistician and a vascular surgeon with later collaboration from a fisheries ecologist that sparked the interest in the merger of ecology, medicine, and health (Rapport et al., 1979). In those heady days, the quest was almost entirely intellectual; the question being raised was: “What, if anything, might the challenges of medicine have to do with those of the environment?” At a fundamental level, they were both complex systems, only partially understood. Going beyond metaphor—in efforts to understand the underlying mechanisms that confer organization, resilience, and vitality—that was the challenge. Over the ensuing decades, that challenge is being met, but as always with twists and turns in the endeavour not envisioned early on. …